I awoke suddenly, sucking a breath in deeply and ravenously like a dead man resurrected from the grave. The monitor was blaring an alarm and the device was shouting at me, yes, shouting.

“ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENT-“

“I’m awake!” I shouted hoarsely, coughing and sputtering.

“Excellent, Candidate Lucion. You have expended as of this instant fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds since Room Five reached room temperature. You have been allotted fifteen minutes of intermission. Are you ready to continue or do you wish to concede the second half?” The monitor told me.

“Yes,” I said through a dry throat. “I wish to continue.”

“Acknowledged. One additional minute has been given to you to prepare mentally for the shock of freezing in recognition of your unusual performance.” It said.

Okay. Okay. I just had to figure out how well I was going to do and then ask how far I needed to go and hope the stars aligned on that one. I blinked and I realized I had regrown my eyes and eyelids. That was one thing down and accounted for.

I took stock of my body and my recovery process from doing the idiotic grasp for the twelfth level of heat intensity. My chest, back, neck, and face appeared to have regenerated to the point of having skin again, though it was raw and reddened and thinly layered. My extremities like my legs and my arms were bare muscle. My hands and my feet were soot covered bone bound together from falling apart and off my body by thin remnants of connective tissue that I’m sure would snap if I tried to move them. My heart pounded even though I was not exerting myself and my head swam.

“I’m going to need some water after this task, monitor.” I said, looking down at the wristwatch.

“Affirmative. Water, electrolyte rich fluids, and food will available before your next test.” It said.

My extra minute was almost up.

“Monitor, how long did it take to cool down Room Five to room temperature?” I asked it.

“Twenty-five minutes.” It replied in answer to my question.

So it had taken me a little under forty minutes to come mostly back from a skeleton stuffed with organs that were rapidly transmuting themselves to ash. Skin was starting to grow in small patches on my legs and arms, the flesh on my torso was turning marble white again, and the beginnings of muscle fibers were creeping along the bones in my hands and feet.

The first stage of the freezing resiliency began and I involuntarily shivered. I could not help it, I was still worn out and weakened from the scorching I had endured, Bronze Imperator or not.

“What’s the minimum number of stages I need to make it through for this?” I said after some time.

“Making it into the fifth stage will mark you as satisfactory.” It said.

I raised an eyebrow. Curious. “That’s less than the heat test.”

“Imperators fare less well against extreme cold than they do extreme heat.” The monitor said.

“Interesting,” I said to myself. No one had ever told me that, but I’m sure most Coppers would never test such things themselves, no fun in it, and those of Bronze Imperator and higher probably would not like for a weakness or flaw to be known to the general public. Bad optics for a Path that liked to present itself as invincible.

The second stage started. My healing was speeding up as it neared completion, and my entire body was once again covered in firm, alabaster flesh like I was made of a statue. I brought my right hand to my head and found that hair strands were pushing their way out of my scalp and that my eyebrows were returning too. When they had completely restored themselves to their preburnt state, I ran my fingers through my silky hair. How did my healing factor know how long to grow my hair to return to normal? My haircuts were not encoded in my genes.

“Fifteen minutes was cutting it close, monitor.” I told it.

“Fifteen minutes of recovery is sufficient for those who can restrain their ambition to avoid leaving in a body bag.” The monitor said. It almost sounded… reproachful at my actions.

I waited a while more and the third stage started. It was not as terrible as I imagined, my body temperature was still blazing hot from both my self-immolation and the rapid cellular growth naturally producing heat as metabolic energy was expended in mitosis and wound healing.

That grace period of excess body warmth passed though and thermal energy leeched out of me like crazy.

My fingers and toes were numb, and I could not feel or move them. Breathing in hurt like the upper stages of the feverish burning. Taking a lesson learned from the previous section, I chose to take one big breath and then cease drawing in more that would only chill me from the inside and cause lung damage. I would only take more in to speak. I shivered furiously and pulled all my limbs together and made myself into a ball.

“Wh-why d-did y-you n-not ask m-me if I w-wanted to stop at the e… e-leventh?” I wondered, my teeth chattering like mad. My eyelids were sticking together when I closed them and I had to break the ice of my frozen saliva every time I moved my tongue to speak.

The question bothered me now that I thought about it. The machine should have known I was in bad enough shape that it should have taken every opportunity to dissuade me from my mission to almost get myself killed. If I was the one designing the system, it would have been asking me five times each stage when I got that bad and ending it if I could not answer immediately. I guess that would be designing these trials for safety, which evidently was not remotely a priority for the Evaluation Committee sent by the Scholarium.

“W-well?” I demanded again. My fingers and toes were turning blue-black, and my skin was cracking from the lack of moisture in the dry air. I was twitching and vibrating and teeth chattering like I had been given ten times the lethal dose of a stimulant.

“It was the Governor’s command that you be given the opportunity to prove yourself to the fullest extent possible.” The monitor said.

What? I closed my eyes and when they froze shut, I did not force them open again. I needed to think. The Governor had been watching my progress? That was… I honestly was not sure whether getting the personal attention of Theseas Claudion was an excellent choice or a horrendous idea.

The fourth stage kicked in, the room getting colder than I could have possibly imagined. I was not shivering or trembling anymore. My body was slowing down, falling into a kind of cryogenic stasis. I opened my eyes forcefully and tried to move my arm, but it would not obey me. The wristwatch was sheathed in frost.

My left ear fell off on its own, splitting off the rest of me like a wife eager to leave her abusive husband. My fingers and toes were black and my whole body was covered in a sheet of ice.

Time passed and I felt closer to the embrace of the underworld then when I had been little more than charcoal and bone. The baking intensity of the first half was nostalgic now, like the thought of a pleasant summer’s day while you were in the dead of winter, wrapped up in blankets to try to stave off the frigid winds. I would give anything to be back there in the first half. The cold made me feel so empty and so tired.

The fifth stage began. After a moment, my wristwatch monitor checked in with me as I suspected it would when I matched the theoretical candidate’s score.

“Would you like to end the test?” It asked me.

I thought about saying no. Maybe I should try and push it again? It was just one more stage of this brutal chill.

I tried to say it, but I could not move my mouth. The muscles simply did not work, and my lips were sealed shut. I could not even move my neck to look down at the device.

“A verbal answer is required within the next ten seconds.”

I fought and fought to regain control over my body and voice, raging inside at my unresponsive flesh, but it was no use. I simply could not abide this unnatural cold that one would never find on any habitable terraformed planet in the Dominium.

“Test ending. You will have fifteen minutes after Room Five reaches room temperature to vacate the chamber and proceed onwards without penalty or demerit.”

I was unable to say anything in response. I fought the involuntary fall into unconsciousness as best I could, while I waited for warmth, sweet and blessed warmth, to come.

“Candidate Lucion, your scores for the temperature resiliency dual test are Satisfactory for cold resistance and Abnormal Primacy: First Class for heat resistance. Congratulations.”